The Trials of Nina McCall

It is nearly a truism that the law is one of the most powerful weapons in the centuries-old battle to control women's sexuality. Yet significant gaps remain in historical study of that conflict. Scott W. Stern addresses a largely forgotten front. For decades the United States enforced a federal plan to combat the spread of sexually transmitted infections (Stis) by arresting suspected prostitutes, subjecting them to physical examinations and forcibly treating them. In practice that meant rounding up women who merely looked suspicious and locking them in reformatories. Inmates were subjected to imprisonment, frequent pelvic examinations, hard labor, poisonous “treatments,” frequent brutal corporal punishment, and the threat of sterilization. The history of the rise and fall of the American plan encompasses a decades-long process involving a vast complex of state and federal legislation. Stern chooses to focus these events through the story of Nina McCall, a woman victimized in Michigan in the early part of the twentieth century. McCall is unique, not in her suffering but in the fact that she was approached by opponents to the American plan, who financed a lawsuit. The trial contributes a record of several practical legal issues raised by the plan

Ancient history · Battle · Criminology · Lawsuit · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society